Deuteron charge radius and Rydberg constant from spectroscopy data in atomic deuterium

TL;DR

This paper describes a method to determine the deuteron charge radius and Rydberg constant from atomic spectroscopy data, providing a more accurate deuteron radius independent of proton measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extraction technique using deuterium spectroscopy data, achieving higher precision in the deuteron charge radius than previous methods.

Findings

Deuteron charge radius Rd = 2.1415(45) fm.

Independent of proton radius measurements.

Five times more accurate than previous CODATA value.

Abstract

We give a pedagogical description of the method to extract the charge radii and Rydberg constant from laser spectroscopy in regular hydrogen (H) and deuterium (D) atoms, that is part of the CODATA least-squares adjustment (LSA) of the fundamental physical constants. We give a deuteron charge radius Rd from D spectroscopy alone of 2.1415(45) fm. This value is independent of the measurements that lead to the proton charge radius, and five times more accurate than the value found in the CODATA Adjustment 10. The improvement is due to the use of a value for the 1S->2S transition in atomic deuterium which can be inferred from published data or found in a PhD thesis.